J. D. Greear to Be Southern Baptist Convention President Nominee

North Carolina pastor J.D. Greear will be nominated for president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Florida pastor Jimmy Scroggins announced today (March 2).

Greear, 42, “is leading his generation to live out a passion for the SBC, missions and the local church,” Scroggins, pastor of Family Church in West Palm Beach, Fla., wrote in a news release stating his intention to nominate Greear during the SBC annual meeting June 14-15 in St. Louis.

During the 14 years Greear has pastored The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., worship attendance has grown from 350 to just under 10,000, Scroggins said. Total baptisms increased from 19 in 2002 to 928 in 2014, the last year for which statistics are available through the SBC’s Annual Church Profile.

Scroggins said The Summit’s “149 people currently with” the International Mission Board marks the largest total from any church in the convention — a statistic the church told Baptist Press the IMB has confirmed. Greear himself served two years with the IMB before being called to The Summit.

Closer to home, The Summit has planted 26 churches in North America in conjunction with the North American Mission Board.

Another key emphasis at The Summit is diversity, Scroggins said, with nearly 20 percent of worship attendees coming from non-Anglo ethnic groups. One of the congregation’s nine campuses is Spanish-speaking, and one is located in a prison, the church said. “Nearly half” of the church’s campus pastors and worship pastors are non-Anglo, Scroggins said.

“Believing J.D. Greear is God’s man for the hour who models in his church the best of what a Southern Baptist pastor is all about,” Scroggins wrote, “I eagerly look forward to placing his name in nomination.”

In his release, Scroggins said the church “voted last year to give $390,000 to the Cooperative Program in 2016, making it one of the top CP giving churches in the state of North Carolina and the SBC.” He noted this marks a 230 percent increase in The Summit’s CP giving.

Three years ago, the congregation voted to increase its giving through the Cooperative Program over a five-year period to 2.4 percent of undesignated receipts, the church confirmed to BP. The Summit reached its goal two years early.

As of Jan. 1, 2016, The Summit began forwarding all its CP giving through the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (BSCNC), the church said. Previously, it forwarded some funds it regarded as CP gifts directly through the SBC Executive Committee for distribution according to the CP allocation formula. In 2013-14, for instance, it gave $96,000 directly to the EC, according to the 2015 SBC Annual. The BSCNC reported CP receipts of $54,000 from The Summit in calendar year 2014. Adding the two numbers together yields the $150,000 the church self-reported as “CP giving” on its 2014 ACP — a total amounting to 1 percent of undesignated receipts.

The Summit’s Great Commission Giving “has been at or around 10 percent for the last several years,” Scroggins wrote. Great Commission Giving is a category of giving established by SBC action in 2011 that encompasses giving through CP, Southern Baptists’ unified program of funding state- and SBC-level ministries, as well as direct gifts to SBC entities, associational giving and giving to state convention ministries.

According to ACP data, The Summit’s Great Commission Giving was 13 percent of undesignated receipts in 2014, 12 percent in 2013 and 15 percent in 2012.

The Summit’s Great Commission Giving includes more than $1 million annually to IMB-related causes and more than half a millions dollars to NAMB-related causes, the church told BP. The Summit additionally is in the process of funding an endowed chair at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary to the total of $500,000.

Greear told BP, “One of the things God has put on my heart is that my generation needs to take personal responsibility for the agencies and the mission boards of the SBC and not just think of them as the SBC’s, but think of them as ours.”

After preaching the Gospel every day for 367 days straight throughout the 2016 presidential campaign season, Daniel Whyte III is preaching the Gospel for 1,000 days during the Trump presidency. If you think a new president being in office is the only thing needed to save America and 'make America great again,' you are woefully deceived. The church must follow through and "keep the main thing the main thing: and that is reaching unbelievers with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and praying for their salvation, for the problem in America is not only disobedient presidents, politicians, and people, but disobedient pastors, preachers, and parishioners who have refused to obey the Lord's Great Commission which is to, 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,' and who have refused to obey God's repeated commands to 'pray without ceasing' for unbelievers, believers, and political leaders." So, we encourage you to pray for the new president, but not to get caught up in the political happenings like the world does. Nothing much is going to change until people get saved and get their hearts right with the Lord. And that is what this campaign is all about.

GLORY BE TO GOD! By the grace of God, over the past 40 years, Daniel Whyte III has preached the Gospel over 6,000 times to over 4 million people in over 25 countries personally, and nearly every country of the world online. In addition, Gospel Light Society International and GLM Omnimedia Group LLC have a network of over 1,000 Christian news sites which contain the preaching of the Gospel and Christian discipleship teaching in every country of the world and in every major city of the world. BCNN1 is a part of that network. Please click here to view some of those sites.